Cissie Swig, SF civic leader, at Harvard

PEOPLE

Sam Whiting

Updated 8:25 pm, Thursday, February 7, 2013

Roselyne (Cissie) Swig, who has accepted a one-year fellowship to study at Harvard, is seen in front of, "Exploded View," by Jim Campbell in her San Francisco, Calif., home on Friday, Feb. 1, 2013.
Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

One day San Francisco arts benefactor Cissie Swig sits at home in her "California figurative room," among works by Diebenkorn and Bischoff, Weeks and Oliveira. Yellow daffodils are in bloom outside the door.

The next day she's left this all behind for an 8:30 a.m. flight east into the cold, gray winter, her bags packed with crimson sweatshirts and scarves, a backpack and binder, all bearing the Harvard crest.

At 82, Swig is going back to school for the first time since she took leave of Cal to marry hotelier Richard Swig, in 1950. Accepted into the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, she will spend a year in a furnished hotel room with a microwave and a dorm fridge, sloshing through the mud and tiptoeing over the ice to make it to class on time.

"I'm not nervous anymore," says Swig, who had already been out to Cambridge to find a place to live, just like any other student. "I'm just in wonderment of all the things that are going to suddenly be in front of me that I'm going to have to confront or participate in, and not have the support system of family."

Carrying a full load of courses would be one thing to confront. But she has a focus that was lacking the last time around - to use her education to develop a strategy for revitalization of Bayview-Hunters Point, the neighborhood across town and a world away from her William Wurster home, with Tommy Church garden, in Presidio Heights.

She has spent two years on an idea she had for an advocacy group called the Bayview Alliance. The idea is now on the verge of action, and she'll spend her Harvard year plotting it out with faculty and bouncing it off the 32 fellows in the program.

Swig hadn't met any of her classmates before leaving, but knows that they each have a minimum of 25 years of distinguished service, whatever their field. "The idea is that these individuals have all of this accumulated experience, and what to do with it?" she says. "It seems that most of the people have always had some idea of doing a social program. It could be anywhere from global poverty to kids on the street."

Acceptance to the program is competitive, and the application process is in depth. Swig may be the only one in it without a college diploma, though she does have honorary degrees from Mills College, Santa Clara University, the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in fine arts. And her list of extracurricular activities probably overloaded the Harvard admissions office file cabinet.

Asked how many boards she will be leaving behind, her answer is "a lot." Pressed for a number, her answer is "a lot." If you want to press it further, you have to go to her executive assistant, Patty Breuer, to learn that Swig serves on 17 boards and participates in 21 organizations worldwide.

She has temporarily withdrawn from each so she won't be tempted to fly home for a meeting. Meanwhile she will maintain in absentia Roselyne C. Swig Community Consultants, her Financial District office with a staff of two.

Class at Harvard started Thursday, and there are no breaks. When the semester ends in late May, Swig will be going on a field trip to Shanghai for a global conference. During the summer, she is expected to work on her Bayview project. Then it is back in September, when focus on the Bayview project will intensify, with a dissertation to be presented to a faculty panel.

The program's students can audit any Harvard class that has room, and she'll take full advantage of that, up through the law school, the business school and the Kennedy School of Government. Though she'll be living in comfort, at the Charles on Harvard Square, "I don't think I will be too sedentary," she says. "I'm very curious. Very, very curious."

She'll be paying tuition and will have a student ID, and she expects to don her Harvard hoodie to walk across the river for hockey games in winter and football games in fall.

Swig has the energy of a freshman, and though her curriculum does not offer credit, maybe she can work something out to transfer units to Berkeley, where she would return as a junior after taking 62 years off.

"I always wanted to finish my degree, but it's not my primary motive in doing this," she says. "Right now my primary motive is to get there and meet the people."

She's expecting visitors from among her four kids and 12 grandkids, but she won't be visited by her Jack Russell, Spud. He's checked into a dog hotel in Sonoma, and she figures to miss him more than he'll miss her.

"He'll be there for a long time," she says. "Would you like to see a picture of him?"